It was not intended to make you feel better. I don't feel better. I was not apologizing for or excusing her. I'm just saying people are complex, and they can do good things and bad things in such contradiction that it's maddening.

She actually is. She was a family friend. I went to school with her kids. I vehemently disagree with most of her politics, particularly regarding Cuba, but she is a kind woman.

Europe and Asia are also taught as two continents, and they're even less separate.

I've lived and worked in the US and Peru, and my mom's Colombian.

She already has a reasonably attractive maybe-gay son around my age.

I would like to remind everyone about to start yelling about Gattaca: Here's what the treatment does: Allows nuclear DNA to come from one woman and mitochondrial DNA to come from another. That's it. It can prevent nasty diseases such as MERRF Syndrome.

you do not want to talk to me about Cuba, Bautista, the Castros, and the exile community. You will lose

I've posted this before, but my mom went to high school with Gloria Estefan, and they were vague friends in the early 80s. There was a six-month period where they hadn't seen each other, and when they finally did my mom told her she had gotten married (to my dad) in the mean time.

I don't, but you quoted Cathy Brennan as an authority on something "feminists" believe, so I was just making sure.

Cathy Brennan is a TERF. Very few of the readers and none of the writers of Jezebel or its sub-blogs are TERFs. The opinions and ideas of TERFs regarding trans people are unfounded and without merit. No one except TERFs lumps MRAs in with Trans* activists or Trans-inclusive feminists. Trans women are women and trans…

issues that affect men as men

Because men who get directly rejected have a non-negligible chance of verbal abuse, assault, and murder. Happens all the time.

Just FYI, that's not quite right. According to the CDC, the rate of HIV infection for African American women is appallingly high (38/100,000 in 2010, or 20 times that of white women and 5 times that of hispanic/latina women), but not the highest. The highest is black men, for whom the rate is 103 new infections per…

There's an excellent series of posts by writer Quinnae Moongazer expressing similar sentiments. Moongazer emphasizes that a culture of outrage hurts the people activist culture is supposed to be supporting, by making them scared to participate in a movement supposedly set up for their own benefit. Part 1 and Part 2,…

Most of the criticism of Emma Watson from the feminist sphere was about her words, and a little about the choice to have HER be the spokesperson, which is also a valid criticism.

People are acting as if before the internet, movements never faced internal criticism. They did, and it was really harsh, and sometimes it split apart those groups, but most of the time it actually made the movement richer. That criticism just didn't have the opportunity to be as public.

I encourage you to read all four articles in full. I think we agree more than we disagree. I don't love every part of Goldberg's article. As Moongazer (the author of the other two pieces) points out in her response to Goldberg that I just found, Goldberg makes the mistake of centering the story around a specific event…

Discussion and internal criticism is one thing, but the rhetoric of the far left towards the moderate left is often way more hostile and vitriolic than anyone's attacks on the right.

Wanting Emma Watson to go further with her speech does not mean you don't sincerely appreciate what she has taken on.

American Football is, on average, 4 hours from start to finish and 11 minutes of actual ball-in-the-air play time.